Category: Etymology

Q: When did it become insulting to call someone crippled rather than handicapped or disabled?

A: Of the three words, “crippled” is by far the oldest, with roots going back to Anglo-Saxon times.

The adjective “crippled” has been in use since before 1300, and the noun “cripple” since about 950, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But another adjective, “lame,” which we wrote about last year, is even older, dating back to around 725, though it’s not heard much today in reference to people.

The OED doesn’t say exactly when “cripple” and “crippled” were first considered insensitive and their use discouraged. And we can’t tell from the published examples cited in the dictionary.

But it’s safe to say that these words began to be replaced in the 20th century—first by “handicapped” and “person with a handicap,” and later by “disabled” or “person with a disability.”

Lately, even “disabled” and “disability” have been criticized by some as negative words that emphasize what people can’t do, rather than what they can. So usage is still changing.

While we can’t precisely pin down dates for these shifts in sense and sensibility, we can pin down a few etymologies.

“Cripple” has similar-sounding relatives in other Germanic languages, all of which have prehistoric roots in a word stem that’s been reconstructed as krupilo-, from the verb kriupan (to “creep”).

As the OED explains, the connection to “creep” may be explained “either in the sense of one who can only creep, or perhaps rather in that of one who is, in Scottish phrase, ‘cruppen together,’ i.e. contracted in body and limbs.”

“Handicap” and “handicapped” were terms used in games and sports long before they were used to refer to disabilities.

They can be traced to “hand i’ cap” (that is, “hand in cap”), an expression originating in the mid-17th century and referring to a game of chance in which forfeit money was put into a cap.

“Handicap” was first applied to horseracing in the mid-18th century. In the sporting sense, it means a disadvantage (extra weight, strokes, or some other condition) imposed on a superior competitor in favor of an inferior one to equalize chances.

“Hence,” the OED says, in the 1890s a handicap came to mean “any encumbrance or disability that weighs upon effort and makes success more difficult.”

But it didn’t specifically mean a person’s physical or mental disability until the early 20th century. The adjective “handicapped,” the OED tells us, was first used this way in 1915.

“Disabled” has been around since the late 16th century in the general sense, defined by the OED as “rendered incapable of action or use; incapacitated; taken out of service.”

While “disabled” has been used since the 17th century in reference to people’s physical and mental capacities, it didn’t replace “crippled” and “handicapped” until modern times. As the OED explains:

“The word disabled came to be used as the standard term in this sense in the second half of the 20th cent., and it remains the most generally accepted term in both British and North American English today. It superseded outmoded, and now frequently offensive, terms such as crippled, handicapped, etc.”

We should mention, however, that not every disabled person considers the term “crippled” insensitive.

For example, Bill Veeck, the owner of several major league baseball teams from the mid-1940s to the early ’80s, didn’t.

Veeck, who was missing part of a leg, gave one of the chapters in his book Veeck as in Wreck this title: “I’m Not Handicapped, I’m Crippled.”

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Q: Google helps me with almost all my language questions, but I couldn’t find a satisfying answer to this one: Is “bad quality” an oxymoron and “good quality” redundant?

A: No, “bad quality” is not an oxymoron (a combination of contradictory or incongruous words). And “good quality” is not redundant.

The noun “quality” has a lot of meanings, including many that could be described as good or bad: a character trait, an inherent feature, a characteristic, and so on.

Merriam-Webster Online lists quite a few examples of such senses, including these: “Honesty is a desirable quality” … “Stubbornness is one of his bad qualities” … “The house has many fine qualities.”

Of course some uses of the noun do indeed suggest excellence, and “good” or “bad” would be unnecessary or out of place with them.

We’ll make up a few examples: “The shop sells only merchandise of quality” … “He’s a member of the quality” … “Where can I find quality at a reasonable price?” … “I was blown away by the quality of the writing.”

When the noun “quality” first showed up in English around 1300, it referred to someone’s character or nature, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. A century later, it came to mean a personal attribute.

Although English adopted the word from the Anglo-Norman or Old French qualité, the ultimate source is the Latin qualitas, which was Cicero’s translation of the Greek word for quality, poiotes, coined by Plato. 

If you’d like to read more, we had a posting a few years ago on the use of “quality” as an adjective meaning excellent or of high quality (as in “quality time”).

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Q: I work for a company where the word “basis” is pervasively misused as a shortcut for “based upon.” Example: “The results were disappointing, basis our quarterly report.” No matter how often I speak up, the misuse has become entrenched in the corporate vernacular.

A: We’ve found several complaints online about the prepositional use of the noun “basis” to mean based upon, regarding, in reference to, and so on, but the usage doesn’t seem very common—at least not yet.

This sense of “basis” isn’t standard English and apparently never has been. We couldn’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary or in any of the standard dictionaries we checked.

When the word “basis” entered English in the 16th century, it meant the bottom of something, like a foundation or a base.

Although English borrowed the word directly from Latin, the Romans borrowed it in turn from the Greek basis (a step).

The ultimate source, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, is a reconstructed Indo-European root for going or stepping.

The English noun took on a figurative meaning—the main constituent or fundamental ingredient of something—at the beginning of the 17th century, according to citations in the OED.

Over the years, the word acquired other senses, including a basic principle and an underlying condition or state of affairs. But we see no basis for using it to mean based upon.

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Q: You can settle a dispute I’m having with my doctor. I say all conditions are pre-existing; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to diagnose them. No? Nu?

A: Well, from your standpoint, all the medical conditions you have when you walk into the doctor’s office are preexisting.

But they’re not necessarily preexisting from your doctor’s standpoint. And especially not from your insurance company’s.

The issue is not whether the condition preexists when you arrive at the examining room. It’s whether the condition preexists when you take out an insurance policy (or, rather, whether it existed “pre” the policy). 

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “pre-existing condition” defines the noun phrase as an insurance term for “a disease or disorder from which a person taking out an insurance policy is known to be suffering, the effect or treatment of which is thus often not covered under that policy (or is only covered after a certain amount of time).”

The usage is relatively new. The first published reference in the OED is from a 1947 issue of the Reno (Nevada) Evening Gazette:

“Many people with disabilities that formerly were not insurable can now secure this new health service and have these chronic pre-existing conditions removed or repaired.”

The latest citation in the OED is from a 2003 issue of New York Magazine: “My new health insurance doesn’t start until March 1, and I wasn’t sure if dirty-bomb radiation would be considered a pre-existing condition.”

Although the OED uses a hyphen in “preexisting,” as do all the examples cited for this sense of the term, we’ll follow the hyphenless spelling in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Interestingly, the adjective “preexisting” is surprisingly old, showing up in English (minus the hyphen) in the late 1500s.

The earliest citation in the OED is from The Silkewormes and Their Flies, a 1599 book written in verse by the farmer, physician, and naturalist Thomas Moffett:

“Now what are seedes and egges of wormes or foule / But recrements of preexisting things.”

In this sense, the OED defines “preexisting” simply as existing beforehand. A similar adjective, “preexistent,” showed up two years earlier. And the verb “preexist” appeared earlier still.

We’ll end with the OED’s first citation for the verb, from The Difference Betwene the Auncient Phisicke, First Taught by the Godly Forefathers (1585), by Robert Bostocke:

“God, which of nothing, that is hauing no matter, preexisting, or goying before, hast created al the world.”

We’ll assume that “goying” here means going, not hanging out with goys. Nu?

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Q: I missed Pat the last time she was on WNYC and didn’t get a chance to ask her about something that has been bothering me. In describing a religious procession, the Catholic press often says things like this: “The priest and lector processed to the altar.” Shouldn’t it be “proceeded” to the altar or “approached” it?

A: We’re sorry you missed Pat on the Leonard Lopate Show, but do you know that you can listen at any time on your computer by going to our WNYC page?

As for your question about the verb “process” (accented on the second syllable), this usage dates from the early 19th century, so it’s relatively new as words go.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb as meaning “to go, walk, or march in procession,” and in fact it’s a back-formation from the noun “procession.” (A back-formation is a new word formed by dropping part of an older one.)

In this sense, “process” is modeled after the verbs “progress” and “transgress,” the OED adds.

It was first recorded, according to Oxford, in Strains of the Mountain Muse (1814), a book of old tales and traditions collected by Joseph Train, a Scottish antiquary and folklorist.

Train wove the old tales into narrative verse form, and the relevant lines (which we’ve expanded from the OED citation) read:

From old Kilwinning’s sacred fane,
Slow marches forth a mystic train,
As venerably as when they
Process on Dedication day.

The OED’s next citation records the use of the verb in the past tense. It’s from a letter written in 1824 by Countess Granville: “On Christmas Day we processed into the chapel.”

In its early days, the dictionary says, the verb was considered colloquial—that is, more suited to speech than to formal writing. (Many back-formations begin life as colloquial expressions.)

But it eventually gained acceptance. Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) list this use of the verb “process” as standard English, though M-W labels is as a “chiefly British” usage.

It retains something of the flavor of a procession or a stately march, which can lend humor when used in an ordinary situation.

For example, the illustration used in American Heritage, from a novel by Anita Brookner, is faintly humorous: “The man in the panama hat offered his arm and … they processed into the dining room.”

This verb, as we said earlier, is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable (pruh-SESS).

The other verb spelled “process” has a different pronunciation (it’s accented on the first syllable, PRAH-sess), and means to prepare, treat, alter, or deal with something.

And you may be surprised to hear the verb meaning to process something (food, for example) is even newer than the verb that means to process somewhere (say, to the altar).

The OED’s earliest published reference for this sense of the word is from an 1878 issue of the Burlington (Iowa) Hawkeye: “Some have been adding a sufficient quantity of that non-crystallizable substance, known as glucose. Honey thus ‘processed’ will not thicken, but it is certainly not pure.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the newer verb was derived from the noun “process,” meaning “a set of actions or changes in a special order (as in the process of making cloth from wool).”

Though the two verbs spelled “process” are so different in pronunciation and meaning, they have a distant ancestor in common.

The nouns they come from, “procession” and “process,” can be traced to the classical Latin process-, the participial stem of the verb procedere (to advance, go forward, come forth).

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Q: I’ve been thinking lately about the often meaningless use of “going forward” in the corporate world. Do you know if there’s anyone who has looked into it—academically or etymologically or otherwise? The phrase keeps nagging at me for some reason and I feel as if there might be something interesting there.

A: We’ve written briefly about “going forward” on our blog, but your question gives us a chance to expand on that earlier posting.

Let’s back up a bit, though, before getting to the biz-speak sense of the phrase you’re asking about.

Within its entry for adverbial uses of “forward,” the Oxford English Dictionary says the word is used figuratively to mean “onward, so as to progress or advance.”

This sense of the word, the OED says, is used chiefly in the phrase “to go forward,” which means “to be in progress or ‘on foot,’ to be going on.”

The infinitive phrase is “to go forward,” and the participial form is “going forward.”

The usage isn’t as new as you might think. The OED’s earliest example is from the works of Thomas More, written sometime before he was executed in 1535:

“There must it nedes bee long ere anye good conclusion goe forwarde.”

Here are the other relevant citations:

1535: “To se that the worke of the house of the Lorde wente forwarde.” (From Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible.)

1766: “Mr. Burchell … was always fond of seeing some innocent amusement going forward.” (From Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield.)

1832: “Dinner was going forward.” (From Life in the Wilds, a parable by the political economist Harriet Martineau.)

We ourselves found many examples of this usage from newspapers published in the early- to mid-20th century.

A headline referring to the marriage of Woodrow Wilson’s daughter in 1913, from the Pittsburgh Gazette Times, reads: “Preparations Going Forward Rapidly for White House Wedding Tuesday.”

A headline about a 1936 strike in Illinois, from the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, reads: “Business Is Going Forward in Strike Town.”

And a picture caption in a 1960 issue of the Southeast Missourian reads: “Buildings Had Been Razed Today and Site Preparations Were Going Forward.”

In all of these citations, the phrase means, generally, “continuing” or “progressing.”

But none of them convey the often empty, throat-clearing sense that’s heard in boardrooms, on the hustings, and so on today—“looking ahead,” “in the future,” “from now on,” and so forth.

This seems to be an extension of that earlier usage, though it’s hard to pin down when the new sense showed up, since many examples from the last few decades can be read two ways, in the old sense and in the new one.

What could be the earliest example may be seen in a November 1980 issue of the New York Times, reporting on a press conference by President-elect Ronald Reagan.

In response to a question, Reagan said: “I not only have confidence in Howard Baker, but I have been informed by members of the Senate that there is no friction and there is no move going forward to change in any way that his position is solid. He will be the majority leader of the Senate.”

In that quotation, however, Reagan could have meant “going forward” in the earlier sense of “progressing,” rather than “looking ahead.”

By the 1990s, clear examples of the new usage were appearing in the news media. Here’s one from the Oct. 8, 1997, issue of the Syracuse Herald Journal:

“ ‘Going forward, a nuclear plant that’s run well is a valuable source of energy,’ Sylvia said.”

We’ll finish this with a recent example of biz speak by Joe Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade:

“The past quarter was great, but going forward many companies may have problems. People are confused about what to think.”

Update: A reader, commenting on July 26, noted that “going forward” is also used in biz speak as “a conversational spacer, like ‘moving right along.’ Example: ‘We’ve heard from Tim. Thank you, Tim. Going forward, let’s hear from Ron.’ ”

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Q: While reading your blog, I notice that you place a comma before “and” in a list of things. For instance, “in the laundry hamper, on the bathroom sink, and under the bed.” I have always thought that it was incorrect to place a comma before the “and” at the end of a series. Where did I get that?

A: The final comma before “and” in a series is optional. It’s sometimes called the “serial comma” or the “Oxford comma” (because it’s a staple at the Oxford University Press).

The use of the serial comma is not incorrect. We don’t know how you got this impression, but we can guess.

There’s a popular misconception that a comma represents a missing “and,” which would make that final comma redundant. This isn’t true, as we pointed out on the blog last year.

Although the serial comma is optional, many publishers and authors (we’re among them) prefer to use it because the comma can add clarity to a series.

This helps when the list includes phrases rather than single words. Example: “His favorite foods are apple pie, bacon and eggs, and mashed potatoes.”

A final comma can also help to avoid putting terms in apposition—that is, identifying them with one another. Example: “He consulted two top oncologists, his uncle and his best friend.”

Are the oncologists his uncle and his friend? If not, use a comma before “and.”

We used a similar example in a posting a couple of years ago. As we said then, a sentence like this cries out for a clarifying comma: “The biggest influences on my career have been my sisters, Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey.”

See what we mean? A serial comma can make a big difference.

R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.), agrees: “The ‘Oxford comma’ is frequently, but in my view unwisely, omitted by many other publishers.”

Many news organizations, including the Associated Press and our old boss, the New York Times, don’t generally use serial commas.

When the two of us worked for the Times, we naturally followed the house style. But we think the serial comma is a good idea. That’s why we use it on our blog.

While we’re discussing commas, we should mention that the word “comma” referred to a small piece of a sentence when it entered English in the late 16th century, but it soon came to mean the punctuation mark at the end of the piece.

Although English adopted the word from the Latin comma, it’s ultimately derived from the Greek komma (literally, a piece cut off), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto adds that the Greek verb koptein (to cut) gave Russians the word kopeck and probably gave English the word “capon.” And with that, we’ll cut this off.

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Q: I was browsing through a collection of “best loved poems” the other day and came across the charming rondeau “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” a favorite of mine. Once upon a time I even had occasion to memorize it (wrongly as it turns out). Two of its lines are: “Time, you thief, who love to get / Sweets into your list, put that in!” I remembered it as “who loves to get,” which sounds better to me. I’m certainly not the one to correct Leigh Hunt, but I would be interested in any comment you might have.

A: You can find published versions of Leigh Hunt’s poem (originally published in the November 1838 issue of the Monthly Chronicle) with either “love” or “loves.” But most of them use the second-person singular “love,” which is appropriate, as we’ll explain.

The earliest version of “Jenny Kiss’d Me” that we could find online was from an 1847 collection of Hunt’s prose writings. In one of the essays, he mentions that a rondeau written by Pope inspired him to write this one of his own:

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.

(We’ve used the punctuation from Hunt’s essay.)

Why does Hunt uses “love,” not “loves,” in his poem? Because the line is addressed to “Time, you thief!” so the second-person verb—the form used with “you”—is correct.

Similar second-person constructions (as in “you who love,” “you who say,” “you who are,” and so on) can be found throughout English literature, whenever the writer addresses a subject referred to subsequently as “who.”

Here’s an example from a sermon by John Wesley: “And as to you who believe yourselves the elect of God, what is your happiness?”

And here’s another, found in a letter written from Italy by Lord Byron in 1819: “All this will appear strange to you, who do not understand the meridian morality, nor our way of life in such respects.”

By analogy, Hunt might have written, “Time! You who love to get / Sweets into your list, put that in.”

Hunt’s poem, commonly known as “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” is actually entitled “Rondeau,” though it’s technically not a rondeau. It has only one stanza and it doesn’t have the typical rhyme scheme of a rondeau. But it does, like a rondeau, begin and end the same way.

Who, you may ask, was Jenny and why did she kiss him? Here’s Hunt’s explanation:

“We must add, lest our egotism should be thought still greater on the occasion than it is, that the lady was a great lover of books and impulsive writers: and that it was our sincerity as one of them which obtained for us this delightful compliment from a young enthusiast to an old one.”

The Carlyle Encyclopedia, edited by Mark Cumming, identifies Jenny as Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle. Her nickname was “Jenny,” according to the encyclopedia, and she kissed Hunt on learning that he’d recovered from one of his many illnesses.

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Q: Is there any difference between “for example” and “for instance”? I use them without distinction, mainly to avoid repetition, but I guess that some differences in meaning or style may exist.

A: There’s no real difference between “for example” and “for instance,” though the second phrase may be slightly more informal.

One definition of the noun “example” is “a typical instance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And one definition of the noun “instance” is “an example.”

The phrase “for example” was first recorded in 1584, and “for instance” in 1657, according to published references in the dictionary.

The OED doesn’t specifically define the phrase “for example, but it says “for instance” means “for example, as an instance of what has been said.”

The abbreviation “e.g.” (for the Latin exempli gratia) means “for example” (literally, “for the sake of example”), but it can be used in place of “for instance” as well.

By the way, we’ve said this before but it deserves repeating: don’t confuse the abbreviation “e.g.” for “i.e.,” which means “that is.” Both abbreviations came into use in English in the 17th century, and they’re often used incorrectly.

Here’s how Pat explains them in her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I (revised 3rd ed.):

“Go ahead. Be pretentious in your writing and toss in an occasional e.g. or i.e. But don’t mix them up. Clumsy inaccuracy can spoil that air of authority you’re shooting for. E.g. is short for a Latin term, exempli gratia, that means ‘for example.’ Kirk and Spock had much in common, e.g., their interest in astronomy and their concern for the ship and its crew. The more specific term i.e., short for the Latin id est, means ‘that is.’ But they had one obvious difference, i.e., their ears. Both e.g. and i.e. must have commas before and after (unless, of course, they’re preceded by a dash or a parenthesis).”

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Q: I’ve been bothered by a usage in the MTA’s automated subway announcement at certain stations (e.g., 14th St.-Union Square): “please be careful of the gap.” One can be plain careful and one can be careful to do or not to do something. But can one be careful of something? Mindful, yes (and that’s presumably what the MTA meant).

A: In some New York City train stations, there’s a gap between the car and the edge of the platform—a nasty hazard for the unwary. The same is true in London.

In New York, subway riders are told to “be careful of the gap.” But in London, riders of the underground are told to “mind the gap.”

In both cities it’s good advice, given in good English.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority could have used the word “mindful” instead, but there’s nothing wrong in its telling people to “please be careful of the gap.”

The phrase “be careful” doesn’t have to be followed by the preposition “to” plus an infinitive, as in these examples: “be careful to cross at the light” … “be careful not to fall” … “be careful to ask permission first.”

It can be followed by other prepositions: “be careful of the eggs” … “be careful around the baby” … “be careful with knives.” This is how “be careful” is used in that subway announcement.

“Be careful” can also be followed by “that” (“be careful that no errors creep in”). And, as you know, the adjective “careful” can be followed by a noun (“a careful surgeon”).

Like most English words, “careful” has undergone some changes over the centuries. When first recorded, in Old English, it had meanings that are no longer used today.

For one thing, it meant “full of grief; mournful, sorrowful,” the Oxford English Dictionary says. For another, “careful” meant “full of care, trouble, anxiety, or concern.”

So in the very distant past, “careful cries” were cries of grief or sorrow; a “careful widow” was a mourning one; a “careful brow” was a troubled brow. In those days, people didn’t tell each other to “be careful.”

Today they do, because “careful” roughly means attentive, painstaking, watchful, cautious, exercising or taking care, and so on.

Though a couple of isolated uses were recorded in the 11th century, examples of the newer meanings didn’t appear in significant numbers until the 16th century.

In its newer incarnations, “careful” is often followed by a preposition. The OED says the word can mean “full of care or concern for, attentive to the interests of, taking good care of,” and so on (the preposition that follow are shown in italics).

Here’s an example of a “careful of,” cited by the OED: “Be careful of the horses, Sam … don’t ride them too fast” (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852).

And as we’ve said, “careful” can also be followed by “that” as well as by infinitive phrases. Here are examples of each:

“Be careful that they are neither thrown about nor changed” (from Hoyle’s Games Improved, 1820).

“Both males and females are careful to ornament their persons with paint” (from William Macgillivray’s The Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt, 1836).

So “careful of” is a well established English usage. The MTA uses the phrase not only in its recorded announcements but also on its website.

On a page entitled “How to Ride the Subway,” the transportation agency says, “Be careful of the gap between the platform and the train.”

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Q: My mother tells me that as a girl she once asked the grocer for a lub of butter, which brings me to my question: why don’t the abbreviations “lb.” and “oz.” look more like the words they stand for, “pound” and “ounce”?

A: Those two abbreviations are short for foreign terms, which is why they bear so little resemblance to their English counterparts.

Our abbreviation “lb.” (plural “lbs.”) is from the Latin libra, which means “pound.” It came into use in English in the 14th century.

And “oz.” (both singular and plural) is from an obsolete Italian word for “ounce,” onza. (The modern Italian term is oncia.) English writers borrowed the “oz.” abbreviation from the Italians in the 15th century.

Two other frequently seen abbreviations, “i.e.” and “e.g.,” are short for the Latin phrases id est (which means “that is”) and exempli gratia (“for example”).

These abbreviations, which came into use in English in the 17th century, are sometimes used incorrectly. Here’s how Pat explains them in her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I (revised 3rd ed.):

“Go ahead. Be pretentious in your writing and toss in an occasional e.g. or i.e. But don’t mix them up. Clumsy inaccuracy can spoil that air of authority you’re shooting for. E.g. is short for a Latin term, exempli gratia, that means ‘for example.’ Kirk and Spock had much in common, e.g., their interest in astronomy and their concern for the ship and its crew. The more specific term i.e., short for the Latin id est, means ‘that is.’ But they had one obvious difference, i.e., their ears. Both e.g. and i.e. must have commas before and after (unless, of course, they’re preceded by a dash or a parenthesis).”

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Q: We say “northeast” and “southwest” in giving directions, not “eastnorth” or “westsouth.” Why do we mention the up or down word first and the left or right word second?

A: Actually people did at one time, mainly in the days before the compass, use such terms as “eastnorth” and “westsouth.”

In fact, Old English versions of “eastnorth” and “westsouth” coexisted with early versions of “northeast” and “southwest,” though the pairs apparently had different meanings. 

But let’s begin with the 16 main compass points in the modern directional system.

In English, the  four principal compass points are north, south, east, and west. The four intermediate points are “northeast,” “southeast,” “southwest,” and “northwest.”

Each of those eight divisions is further divided—“north-northeast,” “east-northeast,” and so on—and in some kinds of navigation the divisions are even smaller.

But it’s the intermediate directions we’re concerned with here—“northeast,” “southwest,” etc. In these compound words, “north” and “south” always come first, while “east” and “west” are subsidiary.

Why is this? There are several reasons.

First of all, speakers of Old English probably didn’t make a conscious decision in favor of using “northeast” instead of “eastnorth” and so on. They were likely influenced by similar compound words in other old Germanic languages.

“Northeast,” which we’ll use as our example, is northostan in Old Saxon, northost in Old Dutch, northastera in Old Frisian, and nordostan in Old High German. It’s noordoost in modern Dutch; noroaustur in Icelandic; and nordost in German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.

And in the Romance languages, it’s northest in Old French; nordest in modern French and Italian; and nordeste in Spanish and Portuguese.

But there’s a more elemental reason why “north” and “south” now come first in such compounds, while “east” and “west” come second.

North has always had a special significance in navigation. In the days before compasses, when mariners relied on the stars to get their bearings, they used the North Star (Polaris) as a reference.

More to the point (if you’ll pardon the expression), the needle of a compass points to the magnetic north, with the other directions derived from that bearing.

And maps commonly include a legend or device pointing to the geographic north; the other directions are assumed from that.

Those are reasons enough for north and south (the “up” and “down” directions, as you call them) to take precedence over east and west (the “right” and “left.”) But there’s one more.

The modern English system of directional points—with four principal directions bisected by “northeast,” “southeast,” “southwest,” and “northwest”—was known to be in use by the early 12th century, which is about when Europeans began using compasses.

This system, says the OED, “superseded an older twelve-point system (with its origin in the twelve winds of antiquity) in which each quadrant was subdivided by two intermediate points at 30° intervals.”

Here again, the OED says, the subdivisions were “denominated by compounds: north-east, east-north; east-south, south-east; south-west, west-south; west-north, north-west.”

Do you find this confusing? The ancient mariners probably did too. As the OED comments, “it is unclear with what degree of exactitude these terms were applied, as the surviving texts evince much confusion.”

Obviously, it was much clearer to divide each quadrant by only one intermediate point (“northeast,” for instance), and then to put one further subdivision on each side of that one (creating “north-northeast” and “east-northeast”).

As we’ve always said, the point of using good, clear English is to communicate. And when words are designed to tell you where you are, they shouldn’t be confusing.

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Q: I thought you might like this (at best) archaic usage in a recent headline on Gizmodo: “This Airplane’s Landing / Was So Violent That It / Bended Its Fuselage.” To its credit, the electronic-gadgets blog has since changed it to “bent.”

A: The word “bended” was the original Old English past participle of the verb “bend,” but it was replaced by “bent” (and briefly “bend”) in Middle English.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “bended” is now “semi-archaic” and used adjectivally, “chiefly in on bended knees, etc.”

Here’s an adjectival usage from Shakespeare’s Henry V (circa 1599): “His bruised Helmet, and his bended Sword.”

The writer of the original Gizmodo headline used “bended” as the past tense of “bend,” not as a past participle.

Although “bended” has occasionally been used as a past tense, primarily in the 16th and 17th centuries, standard dictionaries now list only “bent” as the past tense.

We’re glad you brought that headline to our attention, though, because “bend” is an interesting word. It’s related to “band,” “bind,” “bond,” and “bundle.”

In Old English, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, the verb bendan meant to tie up as well as to curve.

The two meanings apparently developed because of the use of bendan in archery. The tying-up sense was used in reference to bow strings. The bending sense evolved from the curving of the bow.

We’ll end with an excerpt from the Robin Hood ballads (circa 1500), with Robin and his Merry Men, bows bent, ready for battle:

Sone there were good bowes ibent,
Mo than seven score,
Hedge ne dyche spared they none,
That was them before.

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Q: Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d expect the abbreviation for “North” to be “N” on highway exit signs. Here on Long Island (and elsewhere in New York), it’s always “No” (as in “No Conduit Ave” or “No Ocean Avenue”). Would a visitor dare take “No Exit” when it might lead nowhere? I jest, but those abbreviations bug me.

A: We agree that the abbreviation “No” on a street sign can be confusing to a stranger, especially one from out of state.

As it happens, the New York State Department of Transportation is on your side, and when those signs wear out and get replaced, they won’t look the same.

We’ll get back to the signs that bug you and (with the help of a state official) explain this “No” business. But first, a little etymology (this is a language site, after all).

The earliest abbreviation that was used for “north” was the initial “N” (usually capitalized and often followed by a period), a convention that originated in naval terminology.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded example of the abbreviation is from a dispatch sent by Sir Edward Howard, Lord Admiral of the British fleet, to King Henry VIII in 1513: “The Monday last, the wynd roosse soon to N.N.E.”

The single letter “N” has been used to mean “north” ever since. And while a two-letter version, “No.,” is sometimes used for the purpose, the OED has no citations for it.

In fact, in legal language the use of “No.” to mean “north” is a no-no.

The precedent legal dictionaries cite for this is a 19th-century court case (Burr v Broadway Ins. Co., 16 NY 267, 271) that has to do with a building described inaccurately in a fire-insurance policy.

According to the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure (1908), the findings in that trial established the legal use of the initials “E, N, S, and W for east, north, south, and west, respectively.”

And “No.,” say the editors, “was held not to be an abbreviation of ‘north.’” Instead, they write, “No.” is “used as an abbreviation of the word ‘number.’”

Other law dictionaries say the same thing. A 1969 edition of Ballentine’s Law Dictionary defines “no.” as “an abbreviation of number” and says it’s “improper as an abbreviation of ‘north.’ ” The proper abbreviation of “north,” it says, is “n.”

And Black’s Law Dictionary defines the initial “N” this way: “In English, a common and familiar abbreviation for the word ‘north,’ as used in maps, charts, conveyances, etc.”

But when you don’t expect to be sued, is it OK to write “No.” for north? It’s fine, according to standard dictionaries.

Both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) say that “north” can be abbreviated with one letter or two.

M-W gives the two-letter abbreviation lowercased and without a period (“no”), but American Heritage uses the period and says the abbreviation can be capitalized or lowercased (“no.” or “No.”), so sign-makers can justify any of those three options.

We haven’t been able to tell just when the abbreviation “No.” for “north” became acceptable in standard dictionaries (legal terminology aside). But we can make a rough guess.

The two-letter abbreviation doesn’t appear in our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged 2nd ed.). So it seems to have become acceptable to the folks at Merriam-Webster’s sometime within the last 50 years or so.

Regardless of what current dictionaries say, we don’t like the two-letter abbreviation. When seen at a glance or glimpsed through a windshield, it looks like the adverb “no” (the opposite of “yes”). So a sign like “No Beach St.” seems to say you can’t get to the beach from there.

Would a stranger really be confused? Probably not, but who knows?

We think a simple “N” would be better. And as it happens, federal and state (and most municipal) authorities think so too. The New York signs that still say “No” for north just haven’t been replaced in a while.

Jennifer Post, an information officer with the New York transportation agency, says the state now uses the same abbreviations (“N,” “S,” “E,” and “W”) as those recommended by the federal government in its National Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

She recently emailed us to explain why those “NO” exit signs showed up in New York and when we’ll see the last of them:

 “Many of the signs with abbreviations such as NO and SO may have complied with the standard of the time when they were originally installed. But as signs are replaced across the state the abbreviations are being simplified to ‘N’ and ‘S’ to comply” with the new standards.

“The most cost-effective time to make sure a sign meets current standards is when it needs to be replaced.”

Many local governments do the same, she added.

New York City, for example, has a similar policy. Street signs in the city’s five boroughs use the abbreviations “N,” “S,” “E,” and “W,” according to “Standard Highway Specifications” (Vol. II), published by the City of New York Department of Transportation.

That’s good news. Big-city driving is enough of a hassle as it is.

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Q: In 2008, you advised a DJ that it’s OK to use “premises” to describe a singular location, but you didn’t go so far as to say “premise” would be incorrect. This use of the singular “premise” REALLY GRATES on my ears.

A: In that blog posting, we didn’t tell the DJ in so many words that “on premise” is incorrect. But it is, as he probably gathered, because we said the noun is always plural—“premises”—when it means a location or place of business.

In this sense, “premises” is often used with a singular verb, so one can properly write either “premises is” or “premises are.”

In explaining the noun’s history, we said the singular form, “premise,” entered English in the late 1300s as a term in logic meaning a statement or proposition.

In the following century, the plural form “premises” became a term in legal usage. Among other things, it was shorthand for land or buildings mentioned earlier in a deed or other legal document.

As a result of its use in legal terminology, the Oxford English Dictionary says, people in the early 1600s began using “premises” (always in the plural) to mean “a house or building together with its grounds, outhouses, etc., esp. a building or part of a building that houses a business.”

To this day, the word should be plural in this sense, according to the OED as well as standard dictionaries. So “premises” is the word businesses should use when they mean their location or site, and that brings us to another point.

We suspect that the familiar phrase “on site” has led to the use of “on premises” (sometimes written even more elliptically as “on premise”).

But “premises” is generally used with “the,” as in “All baking is done on the premises.” (A Google search found 127 million hits for “on the premises” versus 15.4 million for “on premises.”)

Is it OK to drop the article? Well, Pat finds “on premises” off-putting, but Stewart isn’t put off by it.

This tendency to drop articles isn’t unusual in broadcasting, but Pat wishes it would go away.

In a previous posting , she mentioned examples like “from bullpen” (as in “The manager is bringing Rivera in from bullpen”), or “on scene” (as in “This is Anderson, reporting on scene”), or “in studio” (“Now back to Brian in studio”).

Readers of our blog have written to comment about each of these usages.

We suppose it’s possible that broadcasters adopted this habit from British usage (as they adopted the now ubiquitous “gone missing”).

When we hear Americans dropping their articles, we’re reminded of a humorous piece in the L.A. Times. The writer walked into a restaurant and spotted a friend, who asked her to join him “at table.” The writer replied, “Let’s just sit at booth.”

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Q: Is it OK to say something is “more irrelevant” or do you have to say it’s “less relevant”? The second is more common, but I was wondering if the first is incorrect.

A: Both phrases are acceptable, but they have different shades of meaning.

A careful writer would use “less relevant” when comparing two relevant things, and “more irrelevant” when comparing two irrelevant things.

These hypothetical sentences will illustrate what we mean:

“The salesman insisted that price was less relevant than quality” (quality was relevant, but price less so).

“She considers numerology more irrelevant than astrology” (astrology is irrelevant to her, and numerology even more so).

The word “relevant” has had an interesting history, in case you’d like to know more.

It ultimately comes from the classical Latin verb relevare (to raise, lighten, or lessen), the same word that gave us “relieve” and “relief.”

In medieval Latin, the adjective relevantum or relevans came to mean legitimate, valid, or pertinent, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is the sense of “relevant” that entered English in the early 1500s, originally as a Scottish legal term.

As John Ayto explains in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The modern English sense ‘appropriate’ probably developed from a medieval application of relevare to ‘take up,’ hence ‘take possession of property,’ which led to relevant being used as a legal term for ‘connected with.’”

“Relevant,” the OED says, was first recorded in Scottish law in 1516 to mean “legally sufficient, adequate, or pertinent.”

Soon afterward, another sense developed: “bearing on or connected with the matter in hand,” but the OED says that use of “relevant” was “relatively rare before 1800.”

The contemporary meaning—appropriate or applicable in the circumstances, or having relevance—didn’t become common until the 1950s, the OED says.

We’re old enough to remember that for a while in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the word was so widely overused that it became almost trite.

Here’s an OED citation from a 1969 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “Either we can commit ourselves to changing the institutions of our society that need to be changed, to make them—to use a term which I hate—‘relevant’ … or we can sit back and try to defend them.”

As for “irrelevant,” it first showed up in writing in the late 18th century, and was mostly used to describe legal depositions, arguments, and proceedings.

One of the OED’s few citations for the adjective used in a general sense is from the essayist Charles Lamb, who wrote in 1823, “A Poor Relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.”

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Q: I’m at a loss. Can you help clarify the difference between “guarantee” and “guaranty”?

A: Some sticklers insist on a difference in meaning, but we disagree. In contemporary English, “guarantee” and “guaranty” are nearly always interchangeable as nouns and verbs.

They differ in that “guarantee” is far more popular, and “guaranty” is used in the proper names of some financial institutions. (There’s a difference in pronunciation, too: “guarantee” is stressed on the last syllable, “guaranty” on the first.)

We’ll get to the sticklers later, but first let’s look at what Henry Fowler, the language maven’s language maven, has to say about this in the 1926 first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

“Fears of choosing the wrong one of these two are natural, but needless,” Fowler writes. “As things now are, -ee is never wrong where either is possible.”

Although “guaranty” may be preferred in some legal uses, he adds, it’s OK to use “guarantee” for these senses too.

“Those who wish to avoid mistakes have in fact only to use -ee always,” he concludes.

As for contemporary English, R. W. Burchfield, writing in the 2004 revised third edition of the usage guide, says Fowler’s “advice is still sound.”

All the standard dictionaries we checked have either similar definitions for “guarantee” and “guaranty,” or don’t bother to include an entry for “guaranty.”

“As a look at any good dictionary will show,” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “these two words are interchangeable in almost all of their uses.”

In fact, both the Associated Press and New York Times style books recommend that “guarantee” be used in all cases except in proper names (Guaranty Bank & Trust Co., for example).

Dictionaries define the noun this way: (1) something that assures an outcome; (2) a promise about the quality of a product; (3) a pledge that something will be done in a specified manner; (4) a promise to assume responsibility for another’s debts.

And here’s how the verb is defined: (1) to assume responsibility for another’s debts; (2) to assure the quality of a product; (3) to undertake to do something for another; (4) to make certain of something; (5) to furnish security; (6) to express with conviction.

Bryan A. Garner, one of the sticklers we mentioned above, disagrees with us. In Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), he recommends using “guaranty” for a promise to pay money if someone else fails to do so.

Garner has history on his side, if not modern usage.

The first of these words to enter English is the noun “guaranty,” which showed up in the late 1500s as a promise to answer for someone else’s debts, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The noun “guarantee” appeared in the mid-1600s, the verb “guaranty” in the mid-1700s, and the verb “guarantee” in the late 1700s.

The OED says English adopted “guaranty” from the Anglo-Norman guarantie. The “guarantee” version apparently began as a misuse, “perhaps taken as a semi-phonetic adoption of French garantie.”

In summary, “guaranty” has history on its side, especially used in the sense Garner prefers, but “guarantee” has passed the test of time.

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Q: I recently encountered the verb “essentialize” in an academic monograph: “the term Hinduism is often essentialized.” The meaning here eludes me. (I’ve read what Pat has to say in Woe Is I about “-ize” endings.)

A: The verb “essentialize” means to express something in its essential form—that is, to reduce it to its essentials.

So the author of that monograph is apparently saying that the term “Hinduism” is often reduced to its essentials. In other words, the word “Hinduism” is used to refer to the essence of the religion.

If that is indeed what the author intended, we think he should have said so, even if it meant using a few more words.

But academic writing has its own rules and they don’t include simplicity. Stewart once helped a friend, a French meteorologist, translate a paper into English for a scientific journal.

When Stewart had finished, the English was so readable that the journal wouldn’t publish the paper until it was rewritten in academic jargon. Live and learn!

You can find “essentialize” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and other standard dictionaries.

It’s not all that popular outside academese and bureaucratese (only about 60,000 hits on Google), but “essentialize” has been around in one form or another since the 17th century.

When it entered English in the mid-1600s, it meant “to give essence or being” to someone or something. A noun that showed up at the same time, “essentializer,” referred to the “first fabricator, perfector, essentialiser of Beings or he that gives Essence to Beings.”

The sense of the word that’s apparently being used in the monograph you read (“to formulate in essential form, to express the essential form of”) didn’t show up until the early 20th century, according to the OED.

This 1922 example from the Times Literary Supplement refers to Dante: “A poet in whom the manifold passions and cultural movements of his time were essentialized and ennobled into the highest poetical utterance.”

Many English words have been formed by adding “-ize” to the end of nouns and adjectives. This is a legitimate practice, but it can get out of hand. Here’s an excerpt from Pat’s comments about it in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“For centuries, we’ve been creating instant verbs in English simply by adding ize to nouns (demon → demonize, for instance) or to adjectives (brutal → brutalize). The ancient Greeks were the ones who gave us the idea. The ize ending (often ise in British spellings) has given us loads of useful words (agonize, burglarize, fantasize, mesmerize, pasteurize, pulverize). It’s just as legitimate to add ize to the end of a word as it is to add un or pre to the beginning.

“Yet there can be too much of a good thing, and that’s what has happened with ize. Verbs should be lively little devils, and just adding ize to a word doesn’t give it life. Fortunately, many recent horrors (credibilize, permanentize, respectabilize, uniformize) didn’t catch on. But some lifeless specimens have slipped into the language, among them colorize, prioritize, and finalize, and they’re probably going to be around for a while.”

Our advice: If you don’t like ’em, don’t use ’em. Maybe they’ll go away.

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